Steam Nations

Welcome! STEAM NATIONS is a page that deals with all my steampunk work, including the Glorious Age of Steam (my own setting) and the Empires of Steam & Rust(shared world with Bob Vardeman & company). This is your page for all things steam & punk!

Zoe’s Success

STORIES

My steampunk stories include:

“Of a Feather” (a.k.a. “Kit Chapman-Challenger & the Last Ranodon”) — Available inSteampunk’d and for Kindle here.

Gleaming buildings scrape the sky and zeppelins ply the clouds. Steam technology has changed the world for the better and ushered in what people are calling “The Glorious Age of Steam.” Of course, it’s more glorious for some people (and nations) than others.

Kit Chapman-Challenger is part of both the glory and the regret. She’s the last in a line of famous explorers, and is burdened with both the legacy of her ancestors and years of accumulated debt. Even for the world’s foremost archeobiologist, the bills that accumulate during round-the-world jaunts can all be a bit much. Fortunately for Kit, she has friends who help in her adventures.

Ray Armstrong is Kit’s cousin and right-hand man. He’s brave, strong, and good in a fight–even if his weakness for the ladies does occasionally cause those fights. Zoe Tesla is famous for her spider-grapnel climbing device and her work with Dr. Victor Von Lang. Behind her shy demeanor and wire-rim glasses lurks the brilliant mind of one of the world’s foremost inventors and mechanics.

Together with Kit, Armstrong and Zoe travel the globe seeking out unknown species and archaeological treasures. Now if only they can pay the expenses on their New York mansion…!

EMPIRES OF STEAM & RUST

Cover rough for my first Steam & Rust story.

It is 1915, but not the one you know. It is a world of steam where the lines of nations and empires have been redrawn, where airships rule the skies, and marvelous new inventions abound.

On every continent, in every nation, holes have appeared, in the sky, in the ground, in the water, that seem to lead to another world. Some are no more than pin-pricks in reality. Some could swallow a battleship whole. Some seem to provide an instant conduit from place to place. A man entering one in Zurich might well come out another in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies an instant later. Others have no exit, and those who enter them are never seen again.

Empires of Steam and Rust is a shared world e-publishing venture featuring the writing talents of Bob Vardeman, Mike Stackpoole, Jean Rabe, Nathan Long, Stephen D. Sullivan, and Scott Denning. Each month, one of us will publish a new story that will explore the world that we have created and bring fresh wonders and horrors sure to thrill and amaze.

This story was originally posted on Bill Willingham’s since-defunct Patreon Christmas project in 2016. We hope you’ll enjoy it as a prelude to 2018’s new Cushing Christmas story, “Krampus vs.... Read More»

Welcome to FROST HARROW, my new modern (1990s) gothic horror series! If you’d like to support this and my other work, go to www.CushingHorrors.com and become my patron! You may also enjoy... Read More»